Menu

Though E3 may have closed its doors nearly two weeks ago, the excitement has all but diminished. This was the strongest E3 since the current gen consoles were first unveiled, finally giving players some tantalizing titles to sink their teeth into.

Though I didn’t have the chance to attend this year, the press conferences were among the most memorable that I’ve ever seen. I whooped, I applauded, and…I may have even cried a little.

It’s taken me a while to process everything and construct a more rational representation of my enthusiasm. Below, I’ve listed my favorite titles shown at the Expo in no particular order.

After reviewing Lucky Pause’s Homesick, it occurred to me that it’d be smart to write a basic walkthrough for the game, just to give an extra little push to any players that find themselves stumped. This guide focuses on the puzzles, so you won’t find a detailed breakdown of the in-game cipher (yet). I’ve arranged the breakdown of the puzzles by the areas that they’re found in, so that it’s easy to locate where you’re stuck and avoid any spoilers that you don’t want to see.

I strongly encourage you to take your time with this experience and use this walkthrough as an emergency reference. You will miss the story completely if you breeze through the game using this guide alone.

When applicable, I like to provide updates about what I’ve been doing outside of this blog. May was an especially productive month. I participated in a few new projects, started a few of my own, and wrote a lot of articles for SideQuesting. So, you can think of this as an ICYMI post that details my recent articles and projects.

It’s been over a month since Silent Hills was cancelled. Following this announcement, its playable demo, P.T., was removed from the Playstation Store. Playstations with P.T. already installed were sold at a premium on Ebay, until the site took down all listings and gestured to their policies about selling software. Even Guillermo Del Toro mourned the loss of Silent Hills, remarking that Konami’s decision to can it was “a sort of scorched earth approach.”

This news had a tremendous impact on the gaming community. While most have let Silent Hills quietly fade into the stuff of legends, others have not gone so quietly into that good night. At the time of writing, a petition on change.org has gathered nearly 150,000 signatures, begging Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro to continue developing the game. The petition describes their first encounter with Silent Hills as “instant love” due to the overall quality of P.T.

Silent Hills may be fated to become the best survival horror game that never was, but that doesn’t mean that future entries in the genre can’t learn a thing (or two) from its teaser P.T.Below, I discuss some of the smartest elements of the fabled demo and how future survival horror titles can learn from it.

Like any good fable, this story has a lesson. Once upon a time, I created a new Minecraft world on the Xbox One. I spent hundreds of hours building and building, creating a spawn house, automatic farms, a functional lighthouse, and a railcart system. It took me three months to create this world…and only one productive play session to end it.

When it came time for my friends to see the world, we set out together in search of the end portal. Our quest revealed that the portal had generated into a wall, leaving it incomplete and useless. The moral of the story: don’t sink hundreds of hours into a world until you’ve checked it out. An alternate moral: just play Minecraft on PC.

Distraught and disheartened, I set Minecraft aside for months. Now, I’ve decided to start a new world and rebuild. And I want to share this journey with you.